Peter Elliot Glomb

Peter Elliot Glomb grew up in Florida with no real exposure to watches until, as a teenager drawing cars for a recurring customer's collection of Ferraris, he became curious what watch a man like that would wear. A mental snapshot of an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore 'Bumblebee' on his client's wrist sent him down a rabbit hole of researching how such watches were made — and the eye-watering price tag was enough to set the direction of the next decade of his life. He studied business at Florida Gulf Coast University, partly because the credential would later prove essential for the international visas independent watchmaking training would require, before enrolling in the Nicolas G. Hayek School of Watchmaking in Miami for its 2015/2016 WOSTEP 3000 course, where he discovered, among eight classmates, that he was not necessarily the most naturally gifted but was the most determined to learn. After graduating he reached out to watchmakers in Germany and was taken in by Dirk Dornblüth of D. Dornblüth und Sohn, apprenticing for a year in the small town of Kalbe before relocating to Cologne to work in restoration and complications at Atelier Suché — handling hundreds of movements spanning many eras of watchmaking and gradually forming the design vocabulary that would become his own watch.

Glomb began designing that watch in 2017, backed by a collector willing to bet on him, but the project nearly collapsed: early CAD attempts failed, outsourced US-made parts proved unusable, and a meaningful share of the project budget was lost before he 'accepted defeat' — only to revisit everything in 2022 rather than let the dream die owing a debt he couldn't repay any other way. He rebuilt his bench discipline from roughly a 20% daily success rate upward through sheer repetition and patience, then doubled down rather than simplify: redesigning the case to eliminate all visible screws and add removable triple-stepped lugs, engineering what he describes as the world's first birdcage pinions, developing a proprietary square free-sprung inertia balance system, and expanding the dial to 15 individual components with a more elaborate hand design — his stated goal being to make, in his own estimation, the best three-handed watch he had ever seen, for someone who, before all this, had never even worn one.

The resulting Series 1 Prototype (#00) is roughly 70% complete as of his latest public updates, documented openly on Instagram alongside both successes and failures. The 39mm, 8.4mm-thick in-house case carries a triple-stepped bezel and detachable triple-stepped lugs with no visible screws anywhere on the case, plus a square crown. The in-house dial and hands feature Art Deco numerals, inclined indexes, Art Deco-style hands with a concave spoon profile on the seconds and hour hands, a 'gratté' (scraped/brushed) finish at the dial center, a logo inlay, and components individually heat-tempered for unique coloring. The 13-ligne (29.5mm) in-house movement runs at 18,000 vph (2.5 Hz) and, beyond the square inertia balance and birdcage pinions, includes a Breguet-overcoil hairspring, a 'moustache' anchor, proprietary shock absorbers, a Maltese-cross stop-work mechanism, a fine-adjustment regulator, a uniquely profiled crown and ratchet wheel, a removable pilot hole, a spring-bladed click, a mirror-polished plate beneath the balance wheel, a one-piece crown wheel with downward-facing gear teeth, and — in a detail that has drawn particular attention — a seconds-hacking lever spring made from human hair. Of the watch's 167 total parts, 55 are precision CNC-milled to 0.003mm tolerances (currently outsourced to a specialist machinist while Glomb works toward building his own in-house CNC capability), 85 are entirely handmade by Glomb himself — including hand-vibrated and manipulated raw hairsprings, hand-cut wheel teeth, pinions, arbors, screws, and the balance staff — and 27 are outsourced standard components such as jewels, crystal, mainspring, and strap.